Soviet diplomats left the large apartment complex in Warsaw more than 30 years ago. But some Russians remained until the early 2000s, protected by a wall topped with barbed wire in a city that, with the fall of their empire, had suddenly become hostile territory – and a major target for their intelligence services.
A cheap Russian detective novel left behind inside the now decrepit property perhaps provides a clue to the concerns of Russians who have lived in the complex, known as a spy’s nest since its heyday in the 1980s: “Departure in a Foreign Countryside.”
“The complex has always been called Spyville [cidade de espiões]and many of these guys were real spies,” said Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski.
Fed up with Russia’s refusal to relinquish the property despite court rulings that Moscow no longer had rights to the site, the mayor last month took back the property, declaring he wants to use it to house Ukrainians rather than Russians. Trzaskowski said the number of Russian diplomats in Warsaw has been falling for decades, accelerated by the recent expulsion of 45 suspected spymasters.
“They didn’t need such a huge infrastructure, but they wanted to retain control of the site,” he said. “That’s why we were fighting with them to take it back.”
Built in the late 1970s to house Soviet embassy staff at a time when Poland was still a member of the Warsaw Pact and apparently obedient communist territory, Spyville was officially emptied of diplomats and their families when the Soviet empire collapsed in the late 1970s. 1980, but remained in Russian hands.
A dissolute nightclub open only to Russians and their guests operated here for some time, but the complex, made up of a cluster of concrete buildings surrounding a fetid little pond, has been associated primarily with espionage.
Polish urban explorers who entered the property without permission found Russian newspapers as early as 2005, long after the Russians were supposed to have left. The fact reinforces the complex’s reputation as a place for banditry and hidden trickery.
Marked by mystery and decadence, Spyville was also a small and deeply unwanted outpost of the so-called “Russian world”, a territorial and ideological concept highly prized by Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia.
Putin used this concept to try to justify his invasion of Ukraine, claiming that the country was an inalienable part of Russia. But the idea that Russia — for linguistic, historical, legal or other reasons — would have the right to control pieces of foreign land extends far beyond Ukraine, reaching diverse points that the Kremlin considers to be its own.
In his early years in power, Putin followed the example of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and gave up overseas outposts that no longer served any obvious purpose or were too expensive to maintain. Among them was a listening post in Cuba and a naval base in Yemen.
Since then, however, Putin has taken a very different path, pushing to recover lost property, including the Cuban spy post he abandoned in 2001, a cemetery on the French Riviera containing Russian graves from tsarist times, a church in Jerusalem and other places he considers belong to the “russki mir” – the Russian world.
At the same time, he has resisted relinquishing anything Russia still controls abroad, thwarting Japanese efforts to negotiate at least partial return of islands seized by Moscow at the end of World War II and obstructing Polish claim, supported by court rulings, that Spyville be returned to Poland.
Frustrated by Moscow’s refusal to hand over the Warsaw property, which Russia leased under a Soviet-era deal, last month Mayor Trzaskowski entered the complex for the first time, with the help of a key chain equipped with a metal cutter and a chainsaw and accompanied by the Ukrainian ambassador, as well as a bailiff.
“Spyville is passing into our hands,” declared the mayor. Security guards hired by the Russian embassy did not resist, nor did a representative of the embassy. Russian ambassador to Warsaw Sergei Andreev later denounced to Russian state media the mayor’s illegal “occupation” of a diplomatic site.
The mayor did nothing more than implement court rulings from 2016 and last month, all ignored by Moscow, which invalidated Russia’s claim to control. The Russians insist that they honored the terms of the lease; the Poles say they didn’t.
“The court ruled that the property was leased by the Polish state and that the lease has ended. If you are renting a property and haven’t used it for almost 20 years, that evidently means you no longer need it,” said the mayor.
As a successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia inherited more than 20 properties in Warsaw given or leased to Moscow during the communist era. One of these, which Moscow also fought not to give up, now houses the Ukrainian embassy.
Trzaskowski said his initial plan was to convert the repossessed property into a shelter for refugees from Ukraine, of whom Poland has already taken in nearly 3 million. But he found Spyville in such a state of disrepair — all the elevator cables have been cut, and one of the buildings is not in a state of structural safety — that engineers will now have to decide whether the buildings, the tallest of which is 11 stories high, can be saved or will need to be demolished.
Whatever the decision, the mayor said the complex “will definitely be used for the Ukrainian community” in one way or another. On this, he said, city officials and the Polish central government, who otherwise agree on little and often disagree, “are on the same page.”
